Grass Valley, a Belden Brand, has secured Neerav D. Shah to serve as the company’s new sr. VP, strategic marketing. Shah has more than 25 years of experience in product development, marketing, operations and business development. A creative strategist, Shah most recently held executive and senior leadership positions at ARRIS and Verimatrix, two companies with expertise in developing solutions to deliver and monetize multiplatform content–a growing priority for Grass Valley customers.
Shah and his team will be responsible for refining Grass Valley’s product strategy and market positioning to ensure alignment with the rapidly changing needs of the global broadcast community.
“The broadcast community is undergoing a substantial shift—both in the migration to IP infrastructures and in the need for content to be delivered to multiple platforms simultaneously,” said Marco Lopez, Grass Valley’s president. “Neerav’s expertise in these areas and his ability to navigate complex technology transitions will pay real, immediate dividends for our customers and enable us to meet the changing needs of our core market.”
Shah earned an MBA from Yale, where he specialized in strategy and product development. Prior to that, he completed a Bachelor of Science in computer science at Northwestern University in Illinois as well as the Executive Management Program in Leadership, Innovation and Strategy at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business.
Shah’s appointment coincides with the creation of a key new function within Grass Valley’s executive ranks. Michael Cronk will be leading an important product development initiative called Core Technology, which will ensure Grass Valley product interoperability and consistency across the portfolio. As VP of core technology, Cronk will continue in his role as chairman of the board for the Alliance for IP Media Solutions (AIMS), helping promote and advocate for widely supported, open standards for IP in broadcast.
Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Cartoonist and Writer, Dies At 95
Jules Feiffer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and writer whose prolific output ranged from a long-running comic strip to plays, screenplays and children's books, died Friday. He was 95 and, true to his seemingly tireless form, published his last book just four months ago.
Feiffer's wife, writer JZ Holden, said Tuesday that he died of congestive heart failure at their home in Richfield Springs, New York, and was surrounded by friends, the couple's two cats and his recent artwork.
Holden said her husband had been ill for a couple of years, "but he was sharp and strong up until the very end. And funny."
Artistically limber, Feiffer hopscotched among numerous forms of expression, chronicling the curiosity of childhood, urban angst and other societal currents. To each he brought a sharp wit and acute observations of the personal and political relations that defined his readers' lives.
As Feiffer explained to the Chicago Tribune in 2002, his work dealt with "communication and the breakdown thereof, between men and women, parents and children, a government and its citizens, and the individual not dealing so well with authority."
Feiffer won the United States' most prominent awards in journalism and filmmaking, taking home a 1986 Pulitzer Prize for his cartoons and "Munro," an animated short film he wrote, won a 1961 Academy Award. The Library of Congress held a retrospective of his work in 1996.
"My goal is to make people think, to make them feel and, along the way, to make them smile if not laugh," Feiffer told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in 1998. "Humor seems to me one of the best ways of espousing ideas. It gets people to listen with their guard down."
Feiffer was born on Jan. 26, 1929, in the Bronx. From... Read More